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MsZ Offline OP
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To me the beauty of mIRC was its simplicity. It's a lot easier to come up with complicated things and keep mending and fixing them as needed! mIRC has always kept slim, simple, basic, timeless, a great program for the 1990s and a great program for the 2000s - until this "Vista compatible" version. In the MS and Windows world, where things dont always work like they are supposed to, mIRC used to be an oasis of intelligent programing. Why not keep mIRC that way?

mIRC was a great stand alone program until it decided to become "Vista Compatible", where the installed program got spread in program files, application data, etc.

I used to run several versions of mIRC each with their own script plus own little scriptlets. Doing that became a nightmare after "Vista Compatible mirc". I also separate OS from data in different drives for back up purposes but I cant do that anymore because if I restore a backup I lose the latest mirc logs and settings.

Ever since mIRC decided to get spread on different folders things became a nightmare. I thought I'd install the "Vista Compatible" mIRC in the XP way (forcing it to stay standalone by keeping a mirc.ini in that same directory). Well my computer/Vista didnt like that. I searched the forum to find out why popups.ini isnt working anymore... And why my mIRC 6.34 was all weird even though I had a mirc.ini already in that directory... and what I found was issue after issue, setting after setting that only a computer wizz can understand let alone keep track of. ( example 1 , example 2 )

I am not a newbie. I am not a script wiz. But I wonder if I none of that would happen if mIRC continued to be a standalone program?!?! I migrated from Windows 95 to 98 to 2000 to XP and mIRC always worked great thru every migration. Why? Because it always kept itself detached from Windows "guts". Maybe I am very confused with Vista and dont understand its concept... But come on...!! mIRC used to be so simple... Now it needs pages and pages (of tutorials and forum discussions) to help, guide and fix endless instalation issues!

Some people in this forum may feel tempted to offer me solutions to the issues I am having but that is not what I am asking. I am not asking for that. What I am asking is: is keeping mIRC simple and standalone a crazy or an interesting suggestion?? mIRC always followed Khaled's brilliant mind and his simple concept! Is it "normal evolution" that mIRC should try to comply with Gates' confused mind and "never finished, always crashing" programs?


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Hoopy frood
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Quote:
Ever since mIRC decided to get spread on different folders things became a nightmare. I thought I'd install the "Vista Compatible" mIRC in the XP way (forcing it to stay standalone by keeping a mirc.ini in that same directory). Well my computer/Vista didnt like that.

You seem to be misunderstanding what's happening here. This isn't happening because mIRC is "Vista compatible", mIRC became "Vista compatible" to avoid this issue. mIRC places settings for each user in their user directory by default because Vista prevents regular users from writing to the "Program Files" directory. By circumventing mIRC's default behaviour on Vista you're running up against the problem that mIRC becoming "Vista compatible" was explicitly designed to avoid.

So your issue is, if anything, with Vista itself. There's nothing mIRC can do about it. Personally though I strongly agree with Vista's behaviour. Vista, XP, and 2000 are all multi-user operating systems and many many people use them in this way as "family" computers and so on. In XP and 2000, by allowing regular user accounts to affect system-wide changes these operating systems are vastly more vulnerable to being completely compromised. One person using the computer gets infected with a virus/trojan and suddenly everybody on the computer is infected too. The solution is to have each user only able to write to their own personal directories unless they explicitly provide an administrator password each time they want to do something system-wide. Vista is heavy-handed in its approach to doing this, but only because the subtler hints to get people to use limited user accounts in previous versions of Windows went completely unheeded.

You can still run several versions of mIRC from one user account. You've said you don't want to be told how to do it so I won't bother explaining but it really isn't that hard. It's certainly no harder than it was in previous versions to use a single mIRC installation separately for different user accounts, which is a far more common scenario than the one you're describing. So in this way the new setup of mIRC is a great deal simpler and more user-friendly for the more common usage than before.


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Babel fish
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I always used the way of -r in the command line to run different versions of mIRC...
Why does everyone copy mIRC 20 times to reach that?
C:\Program Files\mIRC\mIRC.exe -r"C:\Your mIRC Folder"

To make it run in the same folder...
C:\Program Files\mIRC\mIRC.exe -r"C:\Program Files\mIRC\mIRC.exe"

I got 4 shortcuts on my desktop for mIRC, all running the same programm with a different root directory.
Pretty simple imo...

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Hoopy frood
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lol @ "does mIRC have to be Vista Compatible"

Yes. I use Vista. So do you apparently. mIRC has to be Vista compatible, otherwise it won't work. That's what compatibility means.

RE: "Well my computer/Vista didnt like that." Guess why? because you setup mIRC in a way that is incompatible with Vista. That's why your data is now stored in AppData, because Vista does not allow data stored in Program Files. So yes, mIRC needs to be Vista compatible because otherwise.. it won't be compatible with Vista (meaning it won't work), and we'd be getting more complaints like the above. The question is: do you want mIRC to work in Vista or not? You probably do, so the answer to the original question should be obvious.


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I couldn't figure out how to run 2 instances so what I did was run one instance of the newer versions and one instance of the older versions which don't use the Appdata folder.

The old versions still work on Vista and I believe you can run as many as you want easily.

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Hoopy frood
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The behaviour for running running two or more instances doesn't change at all. You simply run mirc.exe again, and you have two instances running.

If you're talking about running two different exe files in different folders, it is clearly described in starbucks' post as well as the versions.txt file in mirc.hlp. You simply put the mirc.ini file in the same directory as your second mIRC and mIRC will use that ini file instead of AppData's. You can also read /help Command Line to see how you can specify an mirc.ini file or mirc directory via the command line (or program shortcut), which is ALSO clearly described in Pivo's post.

I'm really not sure how people are still utterly confused on this issue. This information is literally all over the forums, likely on the google too ("mirc appdata" gets enough hits).

On a sidenote I should point out that it really hasn't even been necessary or all that intelligent to run two/more instances of mIRC ever since it got multi-server support eons ago. There's simply no real reason to need two clients running; you can do everything from inside of one single client and have been for the longest time.


- argv[0] on EFnet #mIRC
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RRX Offline
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Originally Posted By: MsZ
To me the beauty of mIRC was its simplicity. It's a lot easier to come up with complicated things and keep mending and fixing them as needed! mIRC has always kept slim, simple, basic, timeless, a great program for the 1990s and a great program for the 2000s - until this "Vista compatible" version. In the MS and Windows world, where things dont always work like they are supposed to, mIRC used to be an oasis of intelligent programing. Why not keep mIRC that way?

mIRC was a great stand alone program until it decided to become "Vista Compatible", where the installed program got spread in program files, application data, etc.

I used to run several versions of mIRC each with their own script plus own little scriptlets. Doing that became a nightmare after "Vista Compatible mirc". I also separate OS from data in different drives for back up purposes but I cant do that anymore because if I restore a backup I lose the latest mirc logs and settings.

Ever since mIRC decided to get spread on different folders things became a nightmare. I thought I'd install the "Vista Compatible" mIRC in the XP way (forcing it to stay standalone by keeping a mirc.ini in that same directory). Well my computer/Vista didnt like that. I searched the forum to find out why popups.ini isnt working anymore... And why my mIRC 6.34 was all weird even though I had a mirc.ini already in that directory... and what I found was issue after issue, setting after setting that only a computer wizz can understand let alone keep track of. ( example 1 , example 2 )

I am not a newbie. I am not a script wiz. But I wonder if I none of that would happen if mIRC continued to be a standalone program?!?! I migrated from Windows 95 to 98 to 2000 to XP and mIRC always worked great thru every migration. Why? Because it always kept itself detached from Windows "guts". Maybe I am very confused with Vista and dont understand its concept... But come on...!! mIRC used to be so simple... Now it needs pages and pages (of tutorials and forum discussions) to help, guide and fix endless instalation issues!

Some people in this forum may feel tempted to offer me solutions to the issues I am having but that is not what I am asking. I am not asking for that. What I am asking is: is keeping mIRC simple and standalone a crazy or an interesting suggestion?? mIRC always followed Khaled's brilliant mind and his simple concept! Is it "normal evolution" that mIRC should try to comply with Gates' confused mind and "never finished, always crashing" programs?


I can totally agree with this.

But that's indeed not what Microsoft wants. The more mess/misery/ reinstallation work/performance waste, the better, because that gives a chance to sell again later.
Regarding mIRC, Microsoft is able to push Vista, leaving commercial programmers no other choice than follow. So it's not realistic to ask to not follow the Vista path.

In fact, you're not happy with how Windows developes, and there is only one way out: another OS. After buying XP pro some years ago, and using it for some months, I reverted back to Win 98, and made a decision: when Win 98 stops working on new hardware, I move to a Linux OS. I already used it for some time (until my second, older computer had a failure). Emulators are able to run some Windows software, including mIRC, in an acceptable way, if you really want to stick with some Windows software.

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Hoopy frood
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Could you be more off the ball? Separating user data from program files has nothing to do with Vista, it has to do with common sense in a multi-user system.

Using the Application Data folder for user data has been Microsoft's recommended (and expected) practice since before XP was released (Win2k preceeded XP). This is not some magical new imposition on "commercial programmers", because commercial programmers (the professional ones) have all been doing it for 8 years. Now finally Microsoft put their foot down with Vista and enforced the recommended practice as mandatory because of all the idiotic misuse of the program files folder got their users into all sorts of trouble. They should be commended for this, not insulted. On the flipside, programmers who don't understand this behaviour need to go read MSDN and learn how to program properly for the OS they're releasing software for. mIRC was guilty of this for many years-- but it's finally fixed, and I've since forgiven Khaled.

You did make one good point though. If you don't like the recommended practices of an OS, you shouldn't be developing for it. Heck, if you don't like the recommended practices of an OS, you shouldn't be using it, meaning if you don't like the idea of an appdata folder, you should be using Win98 or prior (for Microsoft products, anyway).


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RRX Offline
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Originally Posted By: argv0
Could you be more off the ball? Separating user data from program files has nothing to do with Vista, it has to do with common sense in a multi-user system.
Using the Application Data folder for user data has been Microsoft's recommended (and expected) practice since before XP was released (Win2k preceeded XP). This is not some magical new imposition on "commercial programmers", because commercial programmers (the professional ones) have all been doing it for 8 years. Now finally Microsoft put their foot down with Vista and enforced the recommended practice as mandatory because of all the idiotic misuse of the program files folder got their users into all sorts of trouble. They should be commended for this, not insulted. On the flipside, programmers who don't understand this behaviour need to go read MSDN and learn how to program properly for the OS they're releasing software for. mIRC was guilty of this for many years-- but it's finally fixed, and I've since forgiven Khaled.
You did make one good point though. If you don't like the recommended practices of an OS, you shouldn't be developing for it. Heck, if you don't like the recommended practices of an OS, you shouldn't be using it, meaning if you don't like the idea of an appdata folder, you should be using Win98 or prior (for Microsoft products, anyway).

Regarding 'off the ball', can you please explain me the relevance of 'multi-user' in this thread?


Last edited by RRX; 02/09/08 04:27 PM.
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I don't mean to flame but, honestly I think this is one of the dumbest threads I've read on the Vista/mIRC subject. Of course it has to be Vista compatible. For years everyone bitched and complained that Windows wasn't secure and now that it has made strides toward being a more secure OS, people are now bitching and complaining that it is too complicated. It really isn't complicated at all if everyone would stop complaining long enough to take a deep breath, calm down and actually think about it. mIRC was forced to comply with the changes and it did. The same things have been explained over and over and over until everyone is sick to death of explaining them. There are ways around these changes, which too have been explained over and over. One thing I think would make an improvement is if the installation path were followed in the Application Data dir.

If mIRC is installed to (or just run from) \Program Files\mIRC634
The AppData path would be \username\Application Data\mIRC\Program Files\mIRC634

If mIRC is installed to (or just run from) \Program Files\Chat\mIRC
The AppData path would be \username\Application Data\mIRC\Program Files\Chat\mIRC

Basically, whatever location mIRC is installed to or run from, the same path is followed in the AppData dir. This would allow for mIRC to be run from different locations, each location having its own settings folder rather than having to use shortcuts with command line switches.

~ Edit ~
RRX: This was a general reply and was not directed solely at you.


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Hoopy frood
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It's relevant because the change in mIRC was made to respect userdata in multi-user systems (as per Vista's new requirement).

If you didn't piece together the puzzle, the reason Vista no longer allows writing to program files is because you're expected to respect how userdata is stored in a multi-user system-- and that means writing to AppData (or the Documents folder).


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Babel fish
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just put your mirc file in documents and run it from there.

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Originally Posted By: argv0
It's relevant because the change in mIRC was made to respect userdata in multi-user systems (as per Vista's new requirement).
If you didn't piece together the puzzle, the reason Vista no longer allows writing to program files is because you're expected to respect how userdata is stored in a multi-user system-- and that means writing to AppData (or the Documents folder).

Where did the feature requester state his pc is used by more people? Or did you add that piece in -your- puzzle?

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Hoopy frood
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Whether every computer running Vista has multiple users or not, it is still a multi-user OS and all folder structure is designed around that concept. Even when there's only a single person using Vista it is still necessary to work within the multi-user paradigm in order for general computer usage to be performed with limited user privileges - helping to limit the damage done to the computer by viruses and other malware.


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Originally Posted By: starbucks_mafia
Whether every computer running Vista has multiple users or not, it is still a multi-user OS and all folder structure is designed around that concept. Even when there's only a single person using Vista it is still necessary to work within the multi-user paradigm in order for general computer usage to be performed with limited user privileges - helping to limit the damage done to the computer by viruses and other malware.

Yes, that's about the only 'benefit' for a user with an own pc, the potential help from potential viruses from potential people that click on/execute everything they see.
For someone that doesn't, the case is.. different.

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Quote:
from potential people that click on/execute everything they see.
For someone that doesn't, the case is.. different.

You can't really be that ignorant can you?


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Originally Posted By: starbucks_mafia
Quote:
from potential people that click on/execute everything they see.
For someone that doesn't, the case is.. different.

You can't really be that ignorant can you?

I said I don't need multi-user, you then said it also helps to stop malware, someone has to execute malware, and I'm not one of them. I have a computer, I run some software on it, including OS, and I don't want it to dictate me what to store where. Is it hard to understand this point of view?

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It's not hard to understand your point-of-view at all. Is it so hard for you to understand the software manufacturer's point of view? They have to create their product to work for a variety of users, and are (by default) forced to add SOME "features" to keep problems to a minimum, because of the overabundance of people that DO "click on anything" because someone told them to, or out of curiousity.

If you can't live with that, I suggest you write your own, because that seems to be the only way to satisfy your personal wants/needs.


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Hoopy frood
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Quote:
someone has to execute malware, and I'm not one of them.

No. That's not at all true. This is the ignorance I was referring to. Every application you run that interacts in any way with outside data is a potential attack vector, and any exploitable code in those applications can lead to malware being run without the user doing anything. The fact that you don't seem to realise this just underlines how widespread user ignorance is and how people thinking they know better can be very troublesome -- not just for those people but also anyone who has the misfortune of sharing a computer with them and possibly anyone else on the internet who gets bothered by DDoS, spam, or whatever else this newly infected computer chooses to unleash on the rest of the internet.

This is why limited user accounts are a necessity. This is why every other PC OS has used the multi-user concept for decades and defaults to limited privileges for general usage. Vista is Microsoft finally catching up to where everyone else has been for a long time. They've actually made the right choice with their security model (even if they've botched the implementation a bit in UAC) and for all the things that people might choose to complain about in Vista its multi-user setup is not one of them.

You'll have to excuse me if I consider your determination to spread user data all across your computer to be secondary to everyone else's need not to suffer the consequences of your mistakes.


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Hoopy frood
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Multi-user systems are NOT a solution to malware. Multi-user systems are created for systems where there are multiple users, plain and simple. Using a "regular user" account (access roles) to block viruses is just a means to an end of securing a system. This conversation should really have very little to do with malware, nor should it have anything to do with anyone's personal setup-- none of those discussions serve as any justification to revert the multi-user functionality; end of story.


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Originally Posted By: starbucks_mafia

No. That's not at all true. This is the ignorance I was referring to. Every application you run that interacts in any way with outside data is a potential attack vector, and any exploitable code in those applications can lead to malware being run without the user doing anything.

When I say 'have to execute it' I actually meant anything that causes malware execution. Is Internet Explorer malware? No. Why do I not use it? Because the persons writing it/chosed the defaults made bad choices which causes it to be prone to malware.
So I don't use IE.

Originally Posted By: starbucks_mafia

The fact that you don't seem to realise this just underlines how widespread user ignorance is and how people thinking they know better can be very troublesome -- not just for those people but also anyone who has the misfortune of sharing a computer with them and possibly anyone else on the internet who gets bothered by DDoS, spam, or whatever else this newly infected computer chooses to unleash on the rest of the internet.

This is why limited user accounts are a necessity. This is why every other PC OS has used the multi-user concept for decades and defaults to limited privileges for general usage. Vista is Microsoft finally catching up to where everyone else has been for a long time. They've actually made the right choice with their security model (even if they've botched the implementation a bit in UAC) and for all the things that people might choose to complain about in Vista its multi-user setup is not one of them.

You'll have to excuse me if I consider your determination to spread user data all across your computer to be secondary to everyone else's need not to suffer the consequences of your mistakes.

That's thus based on your earlier wrong interpretation - or my not clear enough statement.

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I seriously suggest you do some research on malware. One of the best ways to avoid malware effecting your computer is to run without administrator privileges. What does this to? Well, read-only access to everywhere BUT your user directory, and your user area of the registry.


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